Baby, it’s cold outside.

Winter reminds me of my dad. What season doesn’t?

Springtime was for getting the garden ready. Seeds, soil, and supplies, additional shelves added to the indoor “growing station,” and of course, a big plan for fine-tuning the tomato patch.

In the summer, he tended and harvested, fed the flowers, and did the canning and sauce making.

Come fall, his birthday month, he liked to go deep into his woodworking, mainly carving and meticulously painting his many different duck decoys, the decorative art pieces he signed and gave as gifts to some lucky few. He even sold a few down at Focal Point, a long standing gift shop in my town—a local business featuring the work of local creatives. (Those were the days).

But winter? Winter was for ice fishing.

In the later part November, the rituals would begin. Rods and reels cleaned, reset, and readied. Tip-ups counted, with fresh flags, augers oiled and in working order. New hooks, lines, and jigs. The sled, operational. Outerwear inspected for continued durability. Boots—maybe a new pair but boy he wore out his boots. Cleaning knives sharpened.

My father was a methodical creature. He liked his gear neat and replenished, his tackle box nearly bursting. There was always too much of it—the hoarded but useful, necessary “stuff” that came along with his hobbies. I can totally relate to this because it’s how I am morphing as a painter. Piles of paint tins, random color tubes, an assortment of different quality paper, different sized brushes, specific tissues, cute water jars, and lots of mixing trays and technique books currently pepper a corner of my kitchen. The location isn’t ideal, but it’s pleasantly organized and who cares.

The “illness,” as we call it in our family, has been passed down.

Back in the day, in early December, my dad would start watching the sky. When a New England sky turns from cheerful blue to smoky gray…from brightly picturesque to dreary dark…Candlewood Lake did its metronome waltz, its ebb and flow of ice forming and melting until the low temperatures were steady enough to freeze the water solid. My father perennially hoped for an early cold snap to get the ball rolling. His early jaunts to the smaller, trusty standbys like Squantz Pond and Bantam Lake would be sufficient for a bit, but the “big dance” was always Candlewood Lake, just outside his doorstep. It was a day he could see from his window while he sipped his coffee at 5 a.m.

He was one of those weirdos who loved frosty, crisp weather and could literally sit on a bucket out on the ice for hours. I know he enjoyed the peace and tranquility, the echoing sounds, the smells, and the general “feel” of winter. He loved the solitude and silence. This is yet another way in which my foray into painting draws parallels—I like to “sit inside the quiet” too. It calms my ping pong brain noise, and keeps me from eating my feelings. It curbs my squirrel-like tendency to flit around, doing a lot but also nothing at all in starts and stops. It calms my spirit and gives me precious time to both think and not think.

Winter always reminds me of my dad, and the many ways he actively sought to fill his life, especially when we three young adult birds flew the nest one by one and he retired. Before social media, he did all the things that most of us would post and boast about nowadays. He did it without instant photos to prove he had fun—but I do have plenty of pictures locked inside my head and in little keepsake books and storage boxes on a shelf. They warm me up inside when I look at them. Snowsuits, red and black buffalo plaid, ear-flap hats, big mittens, shearling collars, sunglasses, fish held up high against the whitest backdrop imaginable.

Squinting, smiling, proud, happy. That was my dad on the ice. Little snaps of moments. His moments. Some I remember, some I don’t. One thing I know for sure is he was never, ever cold enough to stop.

When I was a kid, he’d take us out into the middle of the lake in January. I’d skate around, my brother and sister would do the same, but both of them would drop a line with him intermittently. The crisscross cracks across the ice as far as the eye could see always scared me a little, but my dad trusted his instincts and knew the lake like the back of his hand because with all of the things he loved, he lived and learned inside the “doing” of them, year in and year out.

He studied his garden, he perfected his recipes, and he taught himself how to use woodworking tools. But finding and catching beautiful, delicious fish in depths well below the black surface of six inches of ice? That made him a legend. I’ll never know how he knew where to drill a hole or exactly where to place his tip-ups, but he always did—because unfailingly, my dad came home with fish.

In the winter, I cock my head back and watch the sky wax a dusky purple-gray after months of waning blue.

I do this to remember my father, of course, but I do it time and again to remember where I come from and why I’m here, too.

I’m here to create.

~